By Gustavo Petro of October 16, 2023
The barbarism of consumption based on the death of others leads us to an unprecedented rise of fascism, and thus to the death of democracy and freedom. It is barbarism, or global 1933, as I call it. 1933 was the year when Hitler rose to power.
What we see in Palestine will also be the sufferings in the world of all the peoples of the South.
The West defends its excessive consumption and its standard of living based on destroying the atmosphere and the climate, and to defend it, knowing that it will provoke the exodus from the South to the North, and not only of the Palestinian people; it is ready to respond with death. It does not want to transform its economic system, but only as far as the market will go to decarbonize it. And he knows that the effort will be minuscule to save life on the planet. His policy seeks to defend the consumption bubble of the planet’s rich and not to save humanity, whose majorities are disposable, like the children of Gaza.
That is why the strong anti-immigration policies, the concentration camps for immigrants, the thousands of dead shipwrecks, that is why the Darien plug, that is why the economic blockades to the rebellious countries.
The right wing of the West sees the solution to the climate crisis as a “final solution”, the right wing dreams again of Hitler and conquers the majority of the rich and Aryan peoples of the West and our Latin American oligarchies, who see no other world to live in other than that of the “malls” of Florida or Madrid.
The rightists of the south use violence, they break democracy, they feel, because of the north, legitimized to do so. They believe they can kill and carry out genocides, they only need the blessing of world power.
We are going to barbarism if we do not change the power. The life of humanity, and especially of the peoples of the South, depends on the way humanity chooses to overcome the climate crisis produced by the wealth of the North. Gaza is just the first experiment to consider us all disposable.
Carlos Petro is the President of Colombia
Source: Cubadebate translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English